I’m guessing by now you already know that Van Jones, President Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” tendered his resignation in the middle of the night last night and slunk back to the fevered swamps from whence he slithered.

His resignation letter is a masterpiece of petulance and dishonesty, anchored by this sentence:

On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.

The “smear campaign” consisted exclusively of quoting what Van Jones said and reading a petition Van Jones signed. Scurrilous, I know, but that’s what constituted “lied and distortions” to the progressive left.

The best roundups of this story come from Jules Crittenden, Ed Driscoll, and Stacy McCain. If you read even one of their posts, you’ll be better informed than you would if you had followed any major MSM outlet for the past week, a fact not lost on Charles Krauthammer or Jonah Goldberg twice.

It’s not likely you’ll hear more of the MSM’s crashing failure either, says Mark Hemingway.

Not that long ago, the idea that a guy Googling in the basement would be capable of bringing down a White House staffer would have been a story in and of itself. I suppose some might think this sort of thing is old hat five years after Rathergate, but I also suspect that this aspect of the story will be largely ignored because it makes the MSM look very, very bad.

I wonder if Al Gore regrets inventing the internet today?

There are three things that struck me about this story.

1) There wasn’t a single left-wing crackpot conspiracy that Jones didn’t believe, from “Bush knew” to “The CIA is poisoning black people” to “Mumia-Abu Jamal was framed”. Jones showed no independent thought at all. You could get a perfect summary of his political beliefs by reading the signs and banners at an International ANSWER rally. The idea that someone so utterly hidebound in his political thought could ever be in charge of an innovative and dynamic “green jobs” economy is laughable. So how did he end up in the White House? How did he get past the most intrusive vetting questionnaire in the history of vetting questionnaires? Well, it’s pretty clear that the White House thought him perfectly mainstream, which should tell you all you need to know about today’s Democratic Party.

2) Jones picked a really bad time to become a communist. According to Jones, he converted in prison in the early 1990s, not all that long after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. By that point, communism was a thoroughly and loudly discredited political and economic system which had never been successful anywhere it had ever been tried. People were so eager to flee communism that they tore down a wall with their bare hands to get away from it just a couple years before Van Jones declared it an awesome life philosophy. In other words, Van Jones went running toward a completely failed political ideology at the same time that most everyone who had ever followed it was running in the other direction. His conversion was like someone deciding to become the Detroit Lions biggest fan the week after the team went 0-16.

3) Isn’t it something that the MSM spent less time digging into Van Jones’ background than it did Joe Wurzelbacher’s? If the New York Times and the Washington Post had spilled half the ink the man named to an important and highly visible government post as it did on a plumber who dared to ask a question of a Presidential candidate who showed up on his front lawn one day, Jones would have resigned long before now.

Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and is a contributing writer to the American Issues Project. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and would love you to pay his blog a visit. Oh, this post is cross-posted there, too.

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